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Autoregressive (AR) models have long dominated the landscape of large language models, driving progress across a wide range of tasks. Recently, diffusion-based language models have emerged as a promising alternative, though their advantages…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Mihir Prabhudesai , Mengning Wu , Amir Zadeh , Katerina Fragkiadaki , Deepak Pathak

In this work, we provide a systematic survey of Discrete Diffusion Language Models (dLLMs) and Discrete Diffusion Multimodal Language Models (dMLLMs). Unlike autoregressive (AR) models, dLLMs and dMLLMs adopt a multi-token, parallel…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Runpeng Yu , Qi Li , Xinchao Wang

Autoregressive (AR) large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language tasks, yet their inherent sequential decoding limits inference efficiency. In this work, we propose Fast-dLLM v2,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-01 Chengyue Wu , Hao Zhang , Shuchen Xue , Shizhe Diao , Yonggan Fu , Zhijian Liu , Pavlo Molchanov , Ping Luo , Song Han , Enze Xie

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive models (ARMs) for language modeling. However, MDMs are known to learn substantially more slowly than ARMs, which may become problematic when scaling…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Chunsan Hong , Sanghyun Lee , Chieh-Hsin Lai , Satoshi Hayakawa , Yuhta Takida , Yuki Mitsufuji , Seungryong Kim , Jong Chul Ye

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have emerged as a promising new paradigm for text generative modeling, potentially addressing limitations of autoregressive (AR) models. However, current DLMs have been studied at a smaller scale compared to…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-03 Shansan Gong , Shivam Agarwal , Yizhe Zhang , Jiacheng Ye , Lin Zheng , Mukai Li , Chenxin An , Peilin Zhao , Wei Bi , Jiawei Han , Hao Peng , Lingpeng Kong

Masked diffusion language models enable parallel token generation and offer improved decoding efficiency over autoregressive models. However, their performance degrades significantly when generating multiple tokens simultaneously, due to a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Houxing Ren , Mingjie Zhan , Zimu Lu , Ke Wang , Yunqiao Yang , Haotian Hou , Junting Pan , Hongsheng Li

Diffusion-based decoding has recently emerged as an appealing alternative to autoregressive (AR) generation, offering the potential to update multiple tokens in parallel and reduce latency. However, diffusion vision language models (dVLMs)…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Lunbin Zeng , Jingfeng Yao , Bencheng Liao , Hongyuan Tao , Wenyu Liu , Xinggang Wang

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have shown promise in language modeling, yet their scalability and effectiveness in core language tasks, such as text generation and language understanding, remain underexplored. This paper establishes the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-03-03 Shen Nie , Fengqi Zhu , Chao Du , Tianyu Pang , Qian Liu , Guangtao Zeng , Min Lin , Chongxuan Li

Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLMs) promise parallel token generation and arbitrary-order decoding, yet it remains unclear to what extent current models truly realize these capabilities. We characterize MDLM behavior along two…

Autoregressive language models (ARMs) deliver strong likelihoods, but are inherently serial: they generate one token per forward pass, which limits throughput and inflates latency for long sequences. Diffusion Language Models (DLMs)…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-14 Amin Karimi Monsefi , Nikhil Bhendawade , Manuel Rafael Ciosici , Dominic Culver , Yizhe Zhang , Irina Belousova

Masked diffusion language models (MDMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to standard autoregressive large language models (AR-LLMs), yet their optimization can be substantially less stable. We study blockwise MDMs and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Yuxiang Wang , Yu Xiang , Baojian Zhou , Qifang Zhao , Keyue Jiang , Yanghua Xiao , Xiaoxiao Xu

Diffusion language models (DLMs) are promising alternatives to autoregressive language models (ARMs), yet the intrinsic differences in their generated text remain underexplored. We first find empirically that off-the-shelf DLMs exhibit…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Zeyang Zhang , Chengwei Liang , Xingyan Chen , Meiqi Gu , Minrui Luo , Jingzhao Zhang , Tianxing He

Masked diffusion language models (MDLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to autoregressive (AR) language models, offering properties such as parallel decoding, flexible generation orders, and the potential for fewer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-30 Jingyi Yang , Guanxu Chen , Xuhao Hu , Jing Shao

Autoregressive language models are the currently dominant paradigm for text generation, but they have some fundamental limitations that cannot be remedied by scale-for example inherently sequential and unidirectional generation. While…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-08-01 Yuchen Li , Alexandre Kirchmeyer , Aashay Mehta , Yilong Qin , Boris Dadachev , Kishore Papineni , Sanjiv Kumar , Andrej Risteski

In discrete generative modeling, two dominant paradigms demonstrate divergent capabilities: Masked Diffusion Language Models (MDLM) excel at semantic understanding and zero-shot generalization, whereas Uniform-noise Diffusion Language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Yue Liu , Yuzhong Zhao , Zheyong Xie , Qixiang Ye , Jianbin Jiao , Yao Hu , Shaosheng Cao , Yunfan Liu

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) offer a promising parallel generation paradigm but suffer from slow inference due to numerous refinement steps and the inability to use standard KV caching. We introduce CDLM (Consistency Diffusion Language…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-23 Minseo Kim , Chenfeng Xu , Coleman Hooper , Harman Singh , Ben Athiwaratkun , Ce Zhang , Kurt Keutzer , Amir Gholami

Diffusion language models hold the promise of fast parallel generation, while autoregressive (AR) models typically excel in quality due to their causal structure aligning naturally with language modeling. This raises a fundamental question:…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Jingyu Liu , Xin Dong , Zhifan Ye , Rishabh Mehta , Yonggan Fu , Vartika Singh , Jan Kautz , Ce Zhang , Pavlo Molchanov

The main advantages of diffusion language models over autoregressive (AR) models lie in their ability to support parallel generation and bidirectional attention, enabling a more controllable generation process. In recent years, open-source…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-24 Haocheng Sun , Cynthia Xin Wen , Edward Hong Wang

Autoregressive language models, despite their impressive capabilities, struggle with complex reasoning and long-term planning tasks. We introduce discrete diffusion models as a novel solution to these challenges. Through the lens of subgoal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-02-19 Jiacheng Ye , Jiahui Gao , Shansan Gong , Lin Zheng , Xin Jiang , Zhenguo Li , Lingpeng Kong

Masked Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently emerged as a promising alternative to traditional Autoregressive Models (ARMs). DLMs employ transformer encoders with bidirectional attention, enabling parallel token generation while…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Maximo Eduardo Rulli , Simone Petruzzi , Edoardo Michielon , Fabrizio Silvestri , Simone Scardapane , Alessio Devoto